The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (5 page)

Now, nearly fifteen years later, after years of dealing with the confusion of my extended family and peers—“Not even chicken? Chicken doesn’t count!”—I decided that I wanted bacon.

On the final day of my cleanse, I cleared my entire schedule to take a trip to Trader Joe’s, Costco, and the Farmer’s Market. I had to stop myself from picking up every single type of meat imaginable, but still came home with ground turkey, a Wagyu steak, chicken drumsticks, chicken breasts, and the most important of all: bacon.
Or so I thought. My entire life, my mother had restricted us from pork. As a girl, I thought it was out of respect for my father’s religion. But when I grew older, I found out it was because my mother just didn’t think pork was “clean.” This logic didn’t really matter to me, as I had resolved to stop eating all meat except fish anyway. But when standing in the aisle of Trader Joe’s, deciding which type of nitrate-free, hormone-free, organically clean pack of bacon to choose, I opted for the
turkey
bacon—the kind with which we’d grown up.

That evening I returned to my apartment with bags of groceries, filled to the brim with meat, meat seasonings, and vegetables that taste good with meat. I couldn’t even finish the final two vegetable juice cleanses I had paid for; my appetite had already transitioned. I could barely sleep that night, as I dreamt of my first breakfast meal, with its new addition: bacon.

I woke up at six in the morning and went straight to cooking. Scrambled eggs, sweet potato hash, and . . . dry turkey bacon. It didn’t look like it did in all the food shows I had been watching, but now wasn’t the time to nitpick. When I took that first bite and closed my eyes in ecstasy, it was as if I had never left the meat-eating world. It was the best bite of food I had ever eaten in my life. But looking back, I think my pleasure could be equated with one of my longtime abstinent friends getting laid on her wedding night and exclaiming how amazing sex was, even if, in fact, it had been only mediocre. Deep down, I knew there was better in my future. My mother’s aversion to pork didn’t have to be my own. Immediately after breakfast, I went back to the Farmer’s Market and bought the real deal, pork-belly bacon. After
that
first bite, I began a new love affair with pork—I couldn’t understand why it had such a horrible reputation, and I didn’t care to.

Then the unthinkable happened. During my first month as a reformed carnivore, I lost eleven pounds—
without
even working out or dieting. I don’t regret my years as a vegetarian, by any means. Yet to think that the majority of my teenage and adult body issues could have been eliminated had I not been so faithful to the
one
dietary restriction I was ever disciplined enough to maintain is infuriating.

But like a lover you keep despite the mind games he plays, I can never stay mad at food for too long. In fact, I gotta go. I’m craving him now.

ABG Guide: Public Grazing

M
y fellow awkwards, once you step foot out of your own home, expect to be seen. It’s inevitable. It’s taken me two whole decades to acknowledge this horrifying fact, and so now I’ll trade the sweatpants for comfortable mom jeans and pat my ’fro down into a socially acceptable shape before leaving my apartment. It has nothing to do with self-respect, but rather a fear of being talked about, or snapped in someone’s popular @shittyppllooklike Instagram. My fear of walking in front of a group of teenage black kids
1
has NOTHING on my fear of being watched while eating in public.

Living in New York slapped my fear of going out solo right out of me. I used to feel sorry for people eating alone at restaurants or going to the movies by themselves; I’d go so far as to pray that they’d
find a companion to complete them. Then I moved to New York and witnessed millions of people content with doing things by themselves: grocery shopping, subway hopping, park benching, movie watching, restaurant dining. So many things to do alone without fear of any judgment. It was just the norm. I remember the first time I went to see “
Ne le dis à personne
” by myself at Landmark Sunshine Cinema. What an experience! I bought all the snacks I wanted: a medium popcorn, a vegan double-chocolate-chip-brownie cookie, Reese’s Pieces, and a Diet Coke. Then I sat at the end of the aisle of a partially filled theater and propped my feet up on the seat in front me—HEAVEN! No one to ask me questions during the movie, no one threatening to predict what was going to happen next, no one to dip their spit-tipped fingers in my popcorn—just me and the movie. After that, a whole new life of self-imposed isolation opened up to me.

Instead of ordering food to go at my favorite Indian restaurant and carrying it home to eat in my tiny closet-sized room, whose walls would absorb the curried cauliflower smell for three days minimum, I would instead eat
inside
the overtly festive restaurant.

“How many, ma’am?”

“Just one!”

Though it took me a while to fully adjust, I was soon enough content with my phone or the book I had brought to read.

I would take this newfound joy to Los Angeles with me. If anyone felt such pity for me as I used to pity my fellow solo diners, I was oblivious. In fact, in some ways, New York made me embrace being alone. Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t want to die alone, but spending quality time with myself 60 to 70 percent of the day is my idea of mecca.

However, just as singing in the car with your windows rolled
up tricks you into feeling as though you’re truly socially isolated, it is very important to remember that even while eating solo, you are being watched. That offbeat dance you do in your car? Someone has laughed at you. That time you picked your nose in the park? It made someone gag. The way you shoveled food onto your fork with your index finger and then chewed it with your mouth open as chunks of spitfood fell back onto your plate prompted someone to regard you as a savage.

I don’t consume food prettily while alone. It’s all I can do to eat prettily in the company of suitors, when somehow I manage to keep it together just enough to keep them interested. When alone, I both surprise and disappoint myself with how fast I swallow food whole, sometimes to my detriment. Food frequently gets stuck in my throat and chest, often while I’m with company, at which point I lose the ability to talk, my eyes water, and I must go to the bathroom, stick my long, perfectly bulimic finger down my throat, and then cough it out. Then when my food-loving instincts kick in and send the proper “calm down, hungry, greedy bitch” signal to my stomach, I resume. If I’m lucky, this happens only once during the meal, and only when I eat dry foods like rice and poorly-cooked salmon.

If you share my fears and lack the social grace to eat, well, gracefully, practice being L.A.D.Y-like. L.A.D.Y. stands for: Loner Artfully Digesting Yummies. This means, sit in the corner of a restaurant, facing a window, with your back to the rest of the patrons (you’re doing them a service), and feel free to chow down. Be aware of the waiter coming to check up on you. Waiters see customers eat ugly all the time, but those people have
nothing
on you. That’s what the window is for. Take time out of your busy, disgusting chomping to check your reflection every once in a while and to make sure the waiter doesn’t sneak up on you while you have all the sanguine-
colored condiments around your mouth and cheeks, like you’ve just ravaged a zebra carcass.

If this is too much for you to bear, and you can’t eat food without making a mess and drawing attention to yourself, then your best bet is to make use of the “To Go” option. You’re not ready to take advantage of the meditative quality of eating out alone just yet.

Leading Lady

S
everal months ago, I was blocked on Twitter by a disabled, white stripper.

It was the night of the Grammys. I had just left a viewing party/get-together and was a wee bit tipsy. Having witnessed the many talented performers and sexy dancers throughout the night, I was feeling lackluster and was in a self-deprecating mood. So with this fresh on my mind I tweeted, “
Sometimes I really wish I was
2
a stripper. But a respectable one. I would always start off wearing pantsuits and dance to [Queen Latifah’s] ‘U.N.I.T.Y.’
”

This tweet was earnest and, in my mind, harmless. Moments later, I scrolled my mentions, chuckling at the other rhythmless girls who felt my sentiments, before one tweet caught my eye. It
read: “
Wow. How BRAVE. Not like all us gross disrespectable sex workers.
”

The hostility slapped me in the face, so I decided to check out the sender’s time line, to understand how my tweet might have offended her. I read several of her tweets about how much she hates people, and how tired she is of everyone oppressing sex workers in our culture. I read multiple posts about how she was suffering from insomnia as well. As I continued to read through her hatred of all things human, I just knew that surely she couldn’t be placing me in this category of hate. She must have been sleep-deprived and misunderstood my tweet. I responded:

“
We should talk about this in the morning when you get some sleep, Grumpy McGrumperson.
”

And then she promptly responded:

“
We should talk about this when you get some empathy, you whorephobic asshole.
”

And that’s when all hell and confusion broke loose, because I could have sworn that what I’d expressed fit the definition of social media empathy. I had looked at her time line, seen that she was sleep-deprived, and responded to her. But apparently it was insensitive empathy—if that even exists.

And then she blocked me and publicly added me to her ever-growing list of people that she hates. She compared the oppression of being a disabled sex worker to the oppression of being a person of color.
What is the difference between my oppression and your oppression?
she asked. At first I was amused.
What an extremely unpleasant and delusional stripper
, I thought.
Does she make the men and women she entertains feel guilty for enjoying themselves, too? Geez.
I went to bed that night thinking,
I doubt I could have learned any twerk tips from her anyway.
And then the more I thought about it over the next
couple of days, the more her offense and her general anger got under my skin. Why was she so mad? What was it about what I said that triggered her? And what
did
we have in common, if anything?

As I perused her time line from another, unblocked account (
haha, loophole
!
), I noticed how upset she was about the representation of “sex workers,” as she called them, in the media. In all, it seemed she just wanted an accurate, fair representation of her field of work, as opposed to continuing to be the butt of jokes
in television and film. At the very core of her anger was a desire to see a respectable reflection of herself.

I immediately thought of my absolute favorite Junot Díaz quote. He said:

You guys know about vampires? . . . You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “
Yo is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.

Isn’t that the realest shit ever?

The first screenplay I ever wrote was called
Judged Cover
, about a chubby, unattractive, black high school girl who gets her first breakout role in a movie. She deals with an unsupportive mother, starts hanging with the wrong Hollywood crowd, turns to drugs, and eventually commits suicide. It was shitty and sad, but I was so proud of it. I remember giving it to Monique, one of my best friends, to read, and the next school day she came back and asked, “Are you going to play the lead?” I planned on it. The script wasn’t autobiographical by any means, but I could relate to feeling too unattractive to play a leading lady. Also, the fact that she recognized that I could play the pathetic character I had written only confirmed my insecurity.

Ten years later I saw
Precious
, and I remember thinking it was
Judged Cover
on steroids. WHO THE FUCK’S LIFE WAS
THA
T
?! I sat in the theater with my two best friends, Jerome and Devin, fuming as the final scene played. Not because I disliked the film, not because I couldn’t relate to the story, but because Hollywood was so fucking excited about this movie.

I remember turning to my friends after the film and saying, “From now on, I’m going to end all of my complaints with, ‘. . . but at least I’m not Precious.’ ” We spent the rest of the day grateful that we were not Precious. But then I thought, is
that
was it takes to create a sympathetic black female lead character? I could imagine the boardroom meeting.

She has to be obese!

She has to be super poor.

She has to be illiterate!

She has to have an abusive mother who molests her.

She has to be a rape victim of her FATHER!